WHITE CATTLE : AX INQUIRY INTO THEIR ORIGIN, ETC. 265 



a long period of domestication.^ Polled white caitle with black 

 points are, or have been, kept at Somerford Park, in Cheshire, 

 WoUaton, Notts., and Burton Constable, Yorkshire. The 

 domesticated polled white cattle at Somerford Park, Cheshire, 

 have been there for over 200 years. Domesticated white cattle, 

 with red Or brown points, used to be at Gisburne, Yorkshire, and 

 Whallev Abbey, Lancashire. The domesticated white cattle at 

 Gunton and Sickling, in Norfolk, had black and dark-brown or 

 red points. At Woodbastwick and Brooke, Norfolk, the points 

 were red and dark-brown or black and brown. At Stanton 

 Hall, in Suffolk, in ISQ-i, half of the domesticated white polled 

 breed had black points, the other half red points. Polled white 

 cattle have also been kept and termed wild at Middleton in 

 Lancashire, Ardrossan in Ayrshire, and Hamilton, Lanarkshire, 

 but at the latter place they have now been furnished with horns. 

 At Rambouillet, in France, an ancient white hornless breed was 

 also kept, which, unfortunately, was exterminated in 1815 by the 

 cattle plague. Further, a domesticated race of white cattle, 

 horned, with red ears, is know^n to have existed in Wales in the 

 tenth and twelfth centuries. 



With regard to the polled white cattle at Middleton, said to be 

 wild, it is rather a curious circumstance, I think, that Leigh, in 

 the "Natural Historv of Lancashire," savs that in 1700 these 

 wild cattle were supposed to have been brought from the High- 

 lands of Scotland, which shows that a polled white breed existed 

 then in Scotland. The cattle at Hamilton (Cadzow Forest or 

 Chatelherault Park) are known to have been once polled. 

 Martin, writing in 1852, says, " The semi-wild cattle of 

 Chatelherault Park, in Lanarkshire, the descendants of an 

 ancient race, are mostly, if not always, polled." Dr. Knox, 

 in his memoir on " The Wild Ox of Scotland," published by 

 the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1837-8, speaks of the Hamilton 

 cattle as polled, and notes that a cross between a white Hamilton 

 bull and a Shetland cow produced a polled ox nearly quite 

 black. About the same date, 1835-6, a writer in the fourth 



^ Polled cattle are to be found in Southern Norway, and it is stated that 

 our big polled white cattle came to Great Britain 800 years ago with the 

 Baltic Rovers. 



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